What Will Harry Be When He Grows Up?

By a number of accounts, the first word is “naked”.

As the last two installments of the Harry Potter movie series loom ever closer, there’s a lot of speculation about how the story is going to be modified, and one of the hints that We Who Have Read It are noticing off the bat: Didn’t Ron stay home pouting while Hermione and Harry went off on their wacky adventures?  Maybe it’s an early scene we’re given a glimpse of in today’s USA Today, or maybe they’re adjusting the story to include (almost) everybody’s favorite ginger.  (I personally would not mind that, so long as it wasn’t at the expense of the deeper parts of the tale.)

Here’s what I found interesting, though.  There’s mention that a scene exists where Ron’s affection for Hermione is challenged by a curse wherein he sees Harry and Hermione in a pretty hot-and-heavy embrace and… wait for it… Harry’s naked.

Come on, man.  We all got to see the posters for “Equus” (since few of us were lucky enough to live in a place where we could see it onstage), and we get the message.  Dan is a big boy, a grown-up, a real adult.  He has all the appropriate parts necessary for reproduction.  (Also, he’s not circumcised.)  He should be justifiably terrified of being type-cast as “that wizard kid”, but isn’t going way far in the other direction?

Dan Radcliffe isn’t the only one, though.  Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) took on a “bad boy” role in “Cherrybomb”, a film festival treat that recently got a distributor and should be out next year.

The girls are being a little more pragmatic, it seems.  Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) and Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley) both have started university, presumably to nudge the future in their favor.

BBC News had an excellent set of interviews with the stars recently that suggested that one of the best things to come out of the “Harry Potter” series isn’t happening on screen at all.  In our current age of celebrity meltdown everywhere we turn, it seems that these kids we’ve watched grow up through the years at Hogwart’s are really genuinely solid, level-headed people who will likely provide a completely different kind of inspiration in the future: as examples of how to handle success well and avoiding the pitfalls of over-inflated egotism.

Well, we can hope.  I’m rooting for them.